Web Summit here I go

Polarising was at the Web Summit ’16 represented by a strong team of 8 people, including our CEO, Nuno Vilar Moreira. Covering all 3 pavilions with over 20 stages plus the Centre Stage at the Meo Arena wasn’t an easy task, however it was possible to attend the most remarkable keynotes such as the very interesting view for Facebook for the near future (“Ten years from now…” from Mike Schroepfer, CTO of Facebook).

Summarizing the event; the first day was a very big mess with everyone trying to understand where each stage was and how to cope with the giant tracking agenda. Second day was pretty much contaminated with the (un)predictable overnight Trump victory and the third day was a constant nostalgic feeling. The venue was mostly a good place for networking and to understand some general trends around the digital world, spoken by the best panel of speeches. While some of us exhausted ourselves during the ‘traditional’ summit, others managed to get ‘evangelized’ by the spirit of the Night Summit as well.

Buzzwords such as API, Growth, Machine Learning, SaaS, VR and AI were constant among most of the speeches and surely most of our customers will start having this kind of concerns in 2017. The overall feedback from across all summit was positive with many unforeseen surprises (and some very expectable disappointments, like Ronaldinho’s intervention:)

Transportation was one of the main topics, not only at the AutoTech – Talk Robots stage but also at central stage where we learned about autonomous vehicles, fuel cells, electric cars, drones, Hyperloop and even space shuttles. The future is nearer every day and concepts that were only possible in movies are coming live very soon. Can you imagine travelling from Dubai to Abu Dhabi in 12 min? (130 km). Another hot topic was Media and Content Creation and the effects of online monetization among platforms.

Other curiosity worth mentioning is the women quota of 42%, a record for such a ‘techy’ event. Well-done WebSummit!